The Wall Street bailout brouhaha has clogged the pages of newspapers and news sites for the last week. Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke–backed by the Bush Administration–have tried their hardest to hastily push a fix through legislation. The full text of the draft proposal can be found here.

Nested within this at first seemingly innocuous proposal lies a little gem that uncovers exactly why Paulson & Co. have been holding the brink-of-catastrophe gun to congress’s head, hoping for a hasty approval. Section 8 reads in its entirety:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Or, to put it simply, Paulson can do whatever he wants with our $700 billion without telling anyone. Paulson’s feeble attempt at explaining the lack of oversight details in the memo were nothing more than a visceral reaction to being caught in an attempt to go elbow-deep in this country’s fiscal cookie jar.

I thought it would be presumptuous for us in that outline to come up with an oversight mechanism. That’s the role of congress. That’s something we’re going to work on together. So if any of you felt that I didn’t believe that we needed oversight, I believe we need oversight. We need oversight. We need protection. We need transparency.

He must believe the American people are a dumb bunch. Section 8 of his proposal didn’t delegate the authority to establish an oversight plan to congress, it strictly forbade any oversight at all! This wasn’t a mistake; he’s not an idiot. You don’t become the CEO of Goldman Sachs and the United States Treasury Secretary by lacking intelligence.

He is a liar. And once again, in a time of national crisis, the trust that Americans unscrupulously place in our leaders is being exploited.

Update 2:08pm: Perhaps it’s my legislative naivete, but after reading the entire proposal, I find the vague language striking. For instance, Section 12 Clause (1) leaves the door wide-open for the bailout of any member of the financial industry affected by the mortgage crisis. And Section 6 qualifies the spending limit for this bailout to the point where many interpretations are possible, implying $7 billion may not be the cap (a point bolstered by the fact that the requested increase to our current national debt limit in Section 10 is about $700 billion more than the amount requested for the bailout).

Most alarming of all, the bill seems set up to allow unfettered authority on the part of the Treasury Secretary; not only to apply the rules laid out but to interpret and expand them. I recognize that some of these clauses are necessarily vague because the specifics regarding what is necessary to fix the situation are unknown. However, this is an extraordinary amount of power to invest in a single person especially considering that the unilateralism of financial industry bosses played a big part in why we’re in this situation to begin with.